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THE VOICE OF THE INNOCENT BLOOD. 



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PREACHED IN THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, 



WASHINGTON, D. C 



NATIONAL THANKSGIVING DAY. 



November 25, 18SO, 



BY THE PASTOR, 



REV. J. E. RANKIN, D. D. 




WASHINGTON, D. C. 

GIBSON BROTHERS, PRINTERS 



80S 







THE VOICE OF THE INNOCENT BLOOD. 



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PREACHED IN THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, 



WASHINGTON, D. C, 



NATIONAL THANKSGIVING DAY, 



November 35, 1880, 



BY THE PASTOR, 



REV. J. E. EANKm, D. D. 




WASHINGTON, D. C. 

GIBSON BROTHERS, PRINTERS, 
1880. 






o£g 



DEDICATION. 

TO THE LOYAL MEN AND WOMEN IN THE NATION'S CAPITAL 

WHO, FOR THE ELEVEN YEARS OF HIS PASTORATE, 

HAVE SAID TO THEIR PASTOR, 

THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH, AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH. 









THE VOICE OF THE INNOCENT BLOOD. 



"And the Lord said unto Cain, What has thou done? The voice of thy 
brother's blood crieth unto ine from the ground." — Gen., iv, 10. 

There is no better method of showing our gratitude to God, 
for what He has made this nation, than by trying to realize our 
highest possibilities. This is the noblest Te Deum which we can 
offer Him this Thanksgiving morning. God's standards are per- 
fect for nations as well as men. We struggle up one height, and 
we think we have reached the very summit of His purposes and 
of our opportunities. We want a chance to rest and look the 
landscape over, forgetting that God's commandment is always, 
" Come up higher !" " There remaiiieth a rest for the people of 
God." But there is no rest for them here. When one good 
thing has been done, it has only prepared the way for the next 
thing which God would have done. It is God's stepping-stone 
upward, and we are to plant our feet upon it and mount.. 

There are people who will gather in their houses of worship, 
who will gather in their own homes, this 25th day of November, 
comfortable and self-complacent, thankful in their way, and forget 
that on the second day of November, when this great free nation 
were invited to select their Chief Magistrate, to exercise their 
highest act of suffrage, there were multitudes of their fellow-citi- 
zens to whom voting was a farce; to whom the ballot-box was a 
delusion and a lie; who had no more voice in this selection than 
if they had been in the Africa of their fathers. Why was this? 
it was not because, in the day of the nation's peril, they were 
unwilling to don the nation's blue, to buckle on the knapsack, 
and stand shoulder to shoulder with their Saxon brothers, till, un- 
der our "greatest soldier and greatest citizen," who speaks and 
votes as he fought, the star of the rebellion went down in night 
at Appomattox ; they who, till then, had known the nation only 
through her marshals, authorized to seize them and return them 
to hateful bondage. We sometimes have marshals of a different 



4 TIII<> VOICE OF THE INNOCENT BLOOD. 

complexion now.* It was not because, in spite of their original 
heathenism, their present ignorance and degradation, they had 
not the instinct to discern the principles and measures of free- 
dom; to identify themselves and their fortunes with those who 
had undertaken to till up that which was behind, in the labors of 
Hampden and Cromwell, of Thomas Jefferson and Charles Sum- 
ner; to identify themselves and their fortunes with those who, at 
the ballot-box, by legislation and constitutional amendment, were 
supplementing the work of the men who fought and fell at Bull 
Run and Fair Oaks and Gettysburg. It was because of these 
very facts. 

Four years ago we waited in prayerful suspense for long 
months to know, not whom the people had selected as Chief 
Executive, for in many of the States the voice of the peo- 
ple had been suppressed by violence and blood ; we waited in 
prayerful suspense to see if the God of our fathers would not 
provide some way by which the suppressed vote of the people 
might be uttered here at the nation's capital. Some of you 
think that the Electoral Commission was the work of the wisest 
politicians. I do not. It was a pit which God permitted some 
people to dig, that they might fall into it themselves. It was the 
'•allows which Hainan erected for Mordecai ; but Mordecai never 
graced it. It was that he might dangle beneath it himself. It 
was God's method of giving dead men a voice ; of granting them 
what they had been denied at the ballot-box ; of showing that the 
voice of our brothers' blood had been crying up to Him from the 
ground, and that He hail heard it. 

Four years ago, this very Thanksgiving Day, a sermon was 
preached in this house from the text: "And they prayed and 
said, 'Thou, Lord, which knowest the hearts of all -men, show 
whether of these two Thou hast chosen,'" on "The Divinity of 
the Ballot." We did not know anything. God knew, and we 
asked Him to show it. You know how our hearts failed us, and 
how it seemed as though all the results of the Avar were to be 
snatched from us by crime and fraud. Then came the Electoral 
Commission, with its eight to seven, eight to seven, eight to seven; 
until, on March 4th, President Hayes was inaugurated. I see in 

* Frederick Douglass sat just before the speaker. 



THE VOICE OF THE INNOCENT BLOOD. O 

that the hand of God; of One who had heard the voice of our 
brothers' blood. 

THE VOICE OF THE INNOCENT BLOOD, 

this is the subject which I shall discuss to-day. You have al- 
ready anticipated it. 

There is no voice so penetrating at the court of Heaven, in 
the ear of God, as the voice of blood. Blood is life, and life is 
God's gift. The life-blood of the citizen is the life-blood of the 
nation. There are words uttered by President Lincoln, which 
have almost the dignity and majesty and power of the old He- 
brew prophets. Did — 

" The sunset of life give him mystical lore, 
And coming events cast their shadows before?" 

Take these, for example, from his second inaugural address only 
a few short weeks before his martyrdom. What words for a 
State paper ! " If God wills that this war continue until all the 
wealth piled up by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years 
of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood 
drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the 
sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still must it be 
said : ' The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous alto- 
gether." " Until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall 
be paid by another drawn with the sword !" These are the words 
which I want to make emphatic. What an awful exchange we 
found it. Blood for blood ; life for life. It was just what 
Thomas Jeff erson meant when he said of slavery : " I fear for 
the future of my nation, when I remember that God is just." The 
sword had drawn its retributive blood in almost every household 
in the land ; in the households of the great compromisers with 
slavery, as well as of the great slaveholders. Col. Fletcher 
Webster, slain on one of the battle-fields of Virginia, had been 
borne back and laid beside the dust of the greatest statesman of 
the land, at Marshfield. This was God's answer to the ridicule of 
His higher law, of which Mr. Webster had been guilty when he 
spoke of it at Capon Springs as a law higher than the Blue 
Ridge — higher than the flight of the eagle. This was God's re- 



C> THE VOICE OF THE INNOCKNT BLOOD. 

turn to the home of New England's greatest one, of what he in 
his majesty had done for the entrenchment of slavery; unwit- 
tingly, honestly done, I still believe. 

But this was not enough. There was a man, the highest of us 
all; a great-hearted, tender-eyed, patient, suffering one; a man 
who had come to his work sadly, tremblingly, prayerfully ; who 
had said on his way here to the capital, that if going forward in 
the cause of freedom required the shedding of his own heart's 
blood, he was ready for it ; there was a man whom the nation 
had been taught to trust and love and revere as its Chief Execu- 
tive ; it pleased God to take him also, his great work consum- 
mated, the sword of the rebellion surrendered ; to take him from 
the Pisgah height where he only saw the promised land ; to take 
him, the nation's twice chosen Head, in the very flush of our vic- 
tory, with the words of clemency on his lips ; to exact his heart's 
blood, and this was God's word of reply to the men — Northern 
men — who had put their Executive signature to such enactments 
as "the Fugitive Slave Bill" and "the Act repealing the Mis- 
souri Compromise," though the hand of our dead President had 
been set to the Proclamation of Emancipation. And when that 
funeral car made its long procession to Illinois, with the nation's 
greatest men as pall-bearers, and the hearts of the whole people — 
nay, of the whole civilized world — following it as mourners, we 
kucw the full meaning of Mr. Lincoln's prophetic words. It was 
the Avenger of blood at the Executive Mansion. His sword had 
smitten low our highest one. 

" O captain, my captain, our fearful trip is done, 
The ship has weathered every rock, the prize we sought is won ; 
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all are cheering, 
• While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grandly nearing. 
But, O heart ! heart ! heart ! 

O the bleeding drops of red, 
Where, on the deck, my captain lies, 
Fallen, cold and dead ! 

" O captain, my captain, rise up and hear the bells : 

Rise up, for you the flag is flung, for you the bugle swells, 
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths, for you the shores are yearning, 
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning. 
Here, Captain ! dear father ! 

This arm beneath your head ; 

It is some dream, that on deck, 

You've fallen, cold and dead ! 

" My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still ; 
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will : 



THE VOICE OF THE INNOCENT BLOOD. i 

The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done ; 
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won. 
Exult, shores ! and ring, O bells ! 

But I, with mournful tread, 
Walk the deck my captain lies — 
Fallen, cold and dead!" 

The Mosaic system, notwithstanding some mistakes into which 
Mr. Ingersoll thinks its author fell, was wonderful for its human- 
ity, and in no particular more than in the value it puts upon hu- 
man life. For, the more valuable human life, the more every 
man's rights will be respected ; the better every individual man 
will be treated by his fellow. Turn, now, to the 21st chapter of 
Deuteronomy, and you will find this record : " If one be found 
slain in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee to possess 
it, lying in the field, and it be not known who hath slain him, 
then thy elders and thy judges shall come forth, and they shall 
measure the cities which are round about him that is slain; and 
it shall be that the city which is next unto the slain man, even the 
elders of that city, shall take a heifer which hath not been wrought 
with, and which hath not drawn in the yoke, and the elders of 
that city shall bring down the heifer unto a rough valley which 
is neither eared nor sown, and shall strike off the heifer's neck in 
that valley. And the priests, the sons of Levi, shall come near. 
(What had they to do with politics ?) For them the Lord thy 
God hath chosen to minister unto Him, and to bless in the name 
of the Lord ; and by their word shall every controversy and 
every stroke to tried. And all the elders of that city that are 
next unto the slain man shall wash their hands over the heifer 
that is beheaded in the valley ; and they shall answer and say, 
' Our hands have not shed this blood, neither have our eyes seen 
it. Be merciful, O Lord, unto thy people Israel, whom thou 
hast redeemed, and lay not innocent blood unto thy people of Is- 
rael's charge.' And the blood shall be forgiven them. So shalt 
thou put away the guilt of innocent blood from among you." 

Notice, here, that God held the civil government of the city 
nearest the spot where the dead man was found, responsible for 
the deed ; under obligation to make inquisition for this blood-stain 
upon the land which the Lord their God had given them. The 
rulers were to proclaim their own innocence and their ignorance of 
the author of the crime, washing their hands over the heifer be- 



8 THE VOICE OF THE INNOCENT BLOOD. 

headed. They were then to offer prayer to God for forgiveness. 
This was the old Mosaic ritual. What is the ritual of the United 
States Government? Do you think God's regard for the blood of 
the slain — of a man made in His own image — was a thing confined 
to the Old Dispensation? Do you think He has ceased to listen 
to the voice which cries up from the ground when one of His 
creatures is killed? Do you think He is ignorant that there are 
thirteen volumes of United States legislative documents filled 
with the outrages perpetrated by the Ku-Klux organizations of 
the South, simply to suppress what General Hancock elegantly 
calls "nigger domination?" 

General Phil Sheridan reported to the President that official 
records show that in nine years, from 1866 to 1875, thirty-five 
hundred persons, mostly colored, were murdered in the State of 
Louisiana; twelve hundred on account of their political senti- 
ments — that is, because they voted as their instinct taught them. 

I am aware that, aside from political questions, human life is 
far less secure in the Southern States than anywhere else in the 
Union. I believe it is one of the fruits of the depreciation of 
humanity resulting from slavery itself. In his recent work, 
"Homicide North and South," Mr. II. V. Redrield, correspondent 
of the Cincinnati Commercial, a man who has made the subject 
a careful study, who is not a partisan and writes in no partisan 
spirit, says tins: "Upon a close investigation of this subject it is 
found (1) that the number of homicides in the Southern States is 
proportionately greater than in any country on earth, the popula- 
tion of which is rated as civilized; and (2) that the number of 
homicides since the war reaches the enormous aggregate of at 
least forty thousand. Taking Texas, Kentucky, and South Caro- 
lina as average States, and the year L878 as an average year, the 
number is fully fifty thousand. In Texas, during thai year, there 
were more homicides than in the ten States of Maine, New 
Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, 
Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota, with an aggregate popu- 
lation of nearly, if not quite, seventeen millions. In Kentucky, 
the same year, more than in the eight States of Maine, New 
Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, 
Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, with an aggregate population of 



THE VOICE OE THE INNOCENT BLOOD. H 

nearly ten millions. And in South Carolina, that year, more than 
in the eight States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachu- 
setts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Michigan, and Minnesota, with 
an aggregate population of about six millions." Or, if you pre- 
fer, take this language from a Governor of Kentucky, hefore the 
war. It is in his annual message to the legislature, and quoted 
by Mr. Simmer in his speech on "The Barbarism of Slavery:" 
" Men slaughter each other with almost perfect impunity. A 
species of common law has grown up in Kentucky, which, were 
it written down, would in all civilized countries cause it to be re- 
christened, in derision, the Land of Blood." 

Now, let it be understood, in such communities as these, that 
the lives of a few innocent colored men, or the life of a single 
influential white man, like Judge Chisolm, of Mississippi, stands 
between a candidate and his election as Governor, or to the House 
of Representatives, or to the United States Senate, or the Presi- 
dential chair, and they are brushed away as so many dead flies, 
or heaped up in piles like so many dead dogs. It was this fact, 
which, in 1875, led to the framing of the bill for "The Security 
of Elections," sometimes called by its enemies "The Force Bill." 
It was a bill making the forcible invasion of another State 
felony, punishable by a fine of not exceeding $10,000 ; making 
conspiracy to overthrow a State government punishable by a hue 
of from $500 to $5,000; the use of tire-arms at or near the place 
of election of United States officers a crime punishable by a fine 
of from $500 to $5,000; the neglect to give opportunity to 
register, punishable by a fine of $500 to $1,000; destruction or 
mutilation of ballots, by a fine of $500 to $3,000 and imprison- 
ment from 2 to 5 years. If, in the attempt to commit any of the 
above crimes, murder happened, it was murder in the first degree, 
punishable by death. United States district courts were to have 
exclusive jurisdiction of such cases ; United States supervisors of 
election were to be appointed in each county, as now in the large 
cities, and deputy marshals in each Congressional district, in 
whose presence the votes were to 1 >e counted ; 1 (allots and poll- 
lists were to be kept until the close of the first session of Con- 
gress after the election, the custodian being liable to a subpoena 
to produce the original at the national capital; and, finally, 



10 THE VOICE OP THE INNOCENT BLOOD. 

when the State authorities were in complicity with armed efforts 
to overthrow the rights of the people at the 1 >allot-box, the Presi- 
dent was given power, temporarily, to suspend the writ of habeas 
corpus. All fair and equitable, it would seem. 

This, for substance, was the bill as originally drawn. Its 
failure to pass in season for action in the Senate was largely at- 
tributed to the Republican leaders of the House, who, by their 
speeches and by their personal efforts on the floor, did much to 
control the result. The time had come for milder measures. 
The commercial spirit demanded them ; and in the near perspective 
arose the Executive Mansion, and possibly this bill might make 
easy a third term. The failure to pass this bill, and thus to pro- 
tect the colored voters of the South, temporarily turned over the 
Government to the men who had sought to destroy it in the 
field, giving them an apparent majority in both the House and 
Senate, and almost giving them the Chief Executive. But it 
also so alienated the deserted South that when one of the same 
great leaders of the House looked for their votes in two Presiden- 
tial Conventions these votes were denied him ; and no man can 
say wrongfully so, though I believe the prevalent sentiment of 
the North was as much at fault as he was.* 

Now, I charge that this Government, in its legislative and ex- 
ecutive departments, knowing the perils which surrounded the 
colored voters of the South, basely deserted its own citizens, nay, 
its own constituents, to the most inhuman outrages. I charge 
that not one man nominally elected to House or Senate, through 
peril to the life and limb of a majority of such citizens, was, or 
is, entitled to his seat. And it was within the province of these 
bodies, judging of the qualifications of their own members, to 
say s<», and to remand the question back again to the people, un- 
til a fair election took place, rather than have men sit there whose 
official robes were stained with the blood of the innocent; ay, to 
hold those seats vacant until such a result was reached, if it were 
till doomsday, when God himself would take their case in hand ! 
And, by not doing so, I charge that they became accessory to 
the crimes by which such men as Hampton and Butler and Chal- 



* One Member of Congress said : " The North never will believe there is hell 
down there, until the South prove it." 



THE VOICE OF THE INNOCENT BLOOD. 



11 



mers secured a, prima facie claim to their seats. This is the judg- 
ment of strict justice ; the judgment of God, and I believe, also, 
it should be judgment of history. 

After the Thanksgiving sermon preached in this house in 1876, 
the author received a long letter of thanks — the letter was more 
eight pages, foolscap — from ex-Senator Truman C. Smith, of Con- 
necticut, a venerable man now more than eighty years old ; a 
man who stood side by side with Daniel Webster in the great 
discussions of his Senatorial period. In this letter he thus writes : 
"When we consider how many citizens of our country were re- 
morselessly put to death, and others cruelly lacerated, for no other 
reason than that, being of African descent, they proposed to ex- 
ercise their rights as such ; and when we consider, further, how 
many there are who make themselves accessories after the fact to 
such horrid wickedness by rejoicing in party success thus ob- 
tained, we may well tremble, when we recollect that God is just, 
and is as sure to punish wicked nations in time as wicked men in 
eternity, unless both one and the other repent." These are not 
the words of an Orthodox minister ; they are the words of an ex- 
Senator of the United States. Now, my sense of justice leads 
me to apply the phrase, accessories after the fact, not merely "to 
those who rejoice in party success thus obtained," but to every 
citizen of these United States who has not lifted up his voice 
against this great iniquity, and especially to every distinguished 
citizen, from the Presidential chair down, who, during the last 
four years, has been silent upon this subject. I cannot forget 
that our present Chief Executive, much as his Administration has 
done — Providential, as I believe it ; much as he, by virtue of his 
Constitutional power to prevent vicious legislation, has himself 
done, in the interest of free elections — did yet take his seat by 
the votes of thousands of men who imperilled their lives for the 
cause he represented ; did yet take his seat in the Presidential 
chair, and then turn them over to the tender mercies of candidates 
whose competitors were as fairly elected as was he. I do not be- 
lieve there was any bargain, but I believe there was an amicable 
understanding. I believe that the voice of history will be that 
if Rutherford B. Hayes was elected President of these United 
States, Chamberlin was elected Governor of South Carolina and 
Packard, Governor of Louisiana. 



12 THE VOICE OF THE INNOCENT BLOOD. 

There is nothing more disgraceful to the General Government 
than its impassive submission to these outrages upon its citizens. 
I am ashamed of such a Government. Respected and honored 
abroad, it is almost despised at home. An American, a mission- 
ary of the American Board, is killed by Turkish banditti, and it 
is telegraphed all over the world as something by which the civ- 
ilization of the whole world is shocked, and forthwith a tribunal 
is created, at the instance of the Turkish Government, over which 
the American minister to Turkey — our new Postmaster-General — 
presides, and the guilty men are brought to punishment. But 
let the missionary be in the employ of the American Missionary 
Association, and the murder be committed in Georgia or Ala- 
bama — especially let him be a colored man — and the whole mat- 
ter is tamely hushed up, lest any resentment of it, or retaliation 
for it, provoke greater outrages still. The telegraph does not 
declare it ; the civilized world has no knowledge of it. We have 
only to take up his body and bury it, and go and tell Jesus, as 
did the disciples of the beheaded John the Baptist. 

But will it be any better in the future ? It is safe to trust in 
God that it will. There is a man who said at Arlington, on Me- 
morial Day, 1868, beside the graves of fifteen thousand men, 
who though dead — aye! because dead — were witnesses: "Those 
who carried the war for the Union and equal and universal free- 
dom to a victorious issue, can never safely relax their vigilance 
until the ideas for which they fought have become embodied in 
the enduring forms of individual and national life." Did they 
relax their vigilance when they voted against the Force Bill? 
These ideas are in our constitutional amendments; but they are not 
in our individual and national life. And again, the same eloquent 
voice said, on the same occasion: "Peace from the shock of bat- 
tle, the higher peace of our streets, our homes, of our equal rights, 
we must secure, by making the conquering ideas of the war every- 
where dominant and permanent. " "The conquering ideas of the 
war," how beautifully he expresses it! This to the dead witnesses 
at Arlington. Living witnesses surged around him in the metro- 
politan city of the nation — an earnest of the great uprising in 
November — when he said other words in the same noble strain: 
" Another thing we will remember. — (Yes, and we will remember 



THE VOICE OF THE INNOCENT BLOOD. 13 

who said this.) — We will remember our black allies who fought for 
us. Soon after the great struggle began we looked behind the army 
of white rebels and saw 4,000,000 of black people condemned to 
toil as slaves for our enemies, and we found that the hearts of 
these people were God-inspired with the spirit of liberty, and 
that they were our friends. — (Where should we be to-day had they 
been our enemies ?) — We have seen white men betray the nag ; 
but in all that long, dreary war we never saw a traitor in a 1 >lack 
skin. Our prisoners escaping from the starvation of prisons — flee- 
ing to our lines by the light of the North star — never feared to enter 
the black man's cabin and ask for bread. — (But for 1 tread we have 
given the black man a stone!) — In all that period of suffering and 
danger, no Union soldier was ever betrayed by a black man or 
black woman. — (Who betrayed the colored men of South Caro- 
lina and Louisiana?) — And now that we have made them free, 
so long as we live we will stand by these black allies. — (How did 
some of us vote on the passage of the Force Bill ?) — We will 
stand by them until the sun of liberty, fixed in the firmament of 
our Constitution, shall shine witli equal ray upon every man, 
black or white, throughout the Union." True words; noble 
words. Were they mere rhetoric, like apples of Sodom, fair to 
the eye, but dust and ashes in the mouth ? The man whose great 
heart prompted them, whose warm lips uttered them, if he will 
have the courage of his convictions; if he can put them into the 
individual and national life of the American people, as God and 
the American people now give him a chance to do; if he will 
use his large knowledge of men and measures, his magnetism of 
person and of speech ; his grand statesman-like power to do this, 
we will write his name under and near the name of the martyred 
Lincoln, next to that of Ulysses S. Grant. 

He himself has said: "Abraham Lincoln was one of the few 
great rulers whose wisdom increased with his power, and whose 
spirit grew gentler and tenderer as his triumphs were multiplied." 
We ask this second Abram to take pattern after the first, and we 
will no longer call him Abram, father exalted, but Abraham, 
father of a great multitude! 

I know that every time we get a new President we are inspired 
with fresh hope that the consummation is at last attained; we 



14 THE VOICE OF THE INNOCENT BLOOD. 

have found the wisdom and statesmanship we need. Even after 
the death of Abraham Lincoln, we did not ask, "Can any good 
tiling come out of Nazareth 2" We were willing to take what 
good there was in Andy Johnson, and verily believed him the 
Joshua of that Moses we had lost. Brief delusion ! He prom- 
ised to make treason odious. But it was something else which 
he made odious. To quote again from the maxims of the Presi- 
dent-elect : "Nothing is more uncertain than the result of one 
throw; few tilings are more certain than the result of many 
throws." Presidential throws ? "We have just made one. 
Through Lincoln and Johnson and Grant and Hayes, the 
great movement of God's providence, uplifting a nation of 
bondmen, like a new world, from the great deep of civil 
strife, and the pacification, the settling down to the walks of in- 
dustry and peace, of discordant elements, have gone slowly for- 
ward. Reactions have come. We have just recovered from one 
at this time. The vessel has just righted again, and is ready to 
Take the wind, every stitch of canvas spread. It remains to be 
seen whether this new king of men, which we have found among 
the people ; walking among us recognized, but still uncrowned, 
when he steps on deck, will rise to the dignity of the occasion; 
will take the helm of the Ship of State as a master; will dare to 
look with unblenched eye into the eye of the sun of universal 
Liberty; will make his observations in the time to come, as so 
often in time past, from those heavens where serenely blaze the 
constellations of the fathers, and will at last, by the voice of a 
generous people, be set there among them. This is our hope; 
this is our faith. For this hope, for this faith, we thank God to- 
day. God bless James Abram Garfield, the President-elect of the 
American Repu hi if! (bid strengthen him by His might, in the 
outer and inner man! Long live the United States of America! 
And, as for you and me, let us make this covenant again: 

We will not faint or falter now, 

Though other toils there are ; 
We lift to Heaven an unblenched brow, 

And thus we solemn swear : 

Man's wrongs we still will right theui, 

Man's burdens, help him bear ; 
Man's foes, we still will tight them, 

And make his cause our care. 



THE VOICE OF THE INNOCENT BLOOD. 15 

Millions for this have shed their blood, 

In every age allied ; 
Shall we not keep the cause still good 

For which the martyrs died ? 

The sun has seen on many a field 

The flag man loved go down ; 
And yet his cause, with blood thus sealed, 

Has won at last the crown. 

When God incarnate came to earth, 

And stooped to save the race, 
He wrote in blood man's native worth, 

And died to make him place. 

So long as God shall give us life, 

Fresh toils we will not spare ; 
Whate'er the field, the same the strife, 

The same the vow we swear : 

Man's wrongs, we still will right them, 

Man's burdens, help him bear ; 
Man's foes, we still will fight them, 

And make his cause our care ! 



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